for St. John says, "He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in Him."—" He that is in you, is greater than he that is in the world.” Now if God dwelt in Paul by his loving spirit, it becomes our objectors to shew that an indwelling God, and indwelling sin, are one and the same thing; or that the Apostle had strangely altered his doctrine when he asked with indignation, What concord hath Christ with Belial? For if indwelling sin [the Belial within] was necessary to nestle with Christ in St. Paul's heart, and in the hearts of all believers, should not the Apostle have rather cried out with admiration, "See how great is the concord between Christ and Belial? They are inseparable! They always live in the same heart together: and nothing ever parted them, but what parts man and wife, that is, death."

. (3) If a reluctance to serve the law of sin is a proof that we are holy as Paul was holy, is there not joy in heaven over the apostolic holiness of most robbers and murderers, in the kingdom? Can they not sooner or later say, "With my mind [or conscience] I serve the law of God: but with my flesh the law of sin. How to perform what is good I find not. I would be honest and loving, if I could be so without denying myself; but I find a law, that when I would do good, evil is present with me? Nor can any thing be stronger upon this head, than the words of the inhuman princess, who being at the point of committing murder, cried out; "My mind [that is, my reason or conscience] leads me to one thing, but my new, impetuous passion carries me to another against my will. I see, I approve what is right, but I do what is criminal."

ARG. IV. "The man, whose experience is described in Rom. vii. is said to delight in the law of God after the inward man, and to serve the law of God with the mind; therefore he was partaker of apostolic holiness."

ANS. Does he not also say, With the flesh I serve the law of sin? And did not Medea say as much in her way, before she imbrued her hands in innocent blood? What else could she mean when she cried out, I see and approve with my mind what is right, though I do what is criminal?" Did not the Pharisees for a time rejoice in the burning and shining light of John the Baptist? And does not an evangelist inform us, that Herod himself heard that man of God [news] with delight, and did many things too? Mark vi. 20. But, is this a proof that either Medea, the Pharisees, or Herod had attained apostolic holiness?

ARG. V. "The person who describes his unavailing struggles under the power of sin, cries out at last, Who shall deliver me, &c. and immediately expresses a hope of future deliverance; thanking God for it, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Rom. vii. 24, 25. Does not this shew that the carnal man sold under sin was a christian believer, and, of consequence, Paul himself?"

ANS. This shows only that the man sold under sin, and groaning for evangelical liberty, is supported under his unhappy circumstances by a hope of deliverance; and that, when the law, like a severe school-master, has almost brought him to Jesus Christ; when he is come to the borders of Canaan, and is not far from the kingdom of

* Sed trahit invitam nova vis, aliudque cupido,
Mens aliud suadet. Videa meliora, proboque,
Deteriora sequor.

OVID

God, and the city of refuge, he begins to look and long earnestly for Christ, and has at times comfortable hopes of deliverance through him. He has a faith that desires liberty, but not a faith that obtains it. He has a degree of the faith to be healed, which is mentioned, Acts xiv. 9, but he has not yet the actually-healing, prevailing faith, which St. John calls the victory, and which is accompanied with an internal witness that Christ is formed in our hearts. It is absurd to confound the carnal man, who struggles into Christ and liberty, saying, Who shall deliver me, &c. with the spiritual man, who is come to Christ, stands in his redeeming power, and witnesses that the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, has made him free from the law of sin and death. The one may say in his hopeful moments, I thank God [I shall have the victory] through Jesus Christ: but the other can say I have it now. Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory, through Jesus Christ our Lord, 1 Cor. xv. 57. The one wishes for, and the other enjoys liberty: the one has ineffectual desires; and the other has victorious habits. Such is the contrast between the carnal penitent described in Rom. vii. 14, and the obedient believer described in Rom. viii. "There is a great difference" [says the Rev. Mr. Whitfield] "between good desires and good habits. Many have the one, who never attain the other." [Many come up to the experience of a carnal penitent, who never attain the experience of an obedient believer.] "Many have good desires to subdue sin; and yet, resting in those good desires, sin has always had the dominion over them;" [with the flesh they have always served the law of sin.] "A person sick of a fever may desire to be in health, but that desire is not health itself." Whitfield's Works, Vol. iv. page 7. If the Calvinists would do justice to this important distinction, they would soon drop the argument which I answer, and the yoke of carnality which they try to fix upon St. Paul's neck,

ARG. VI. "You plead hard for the Apostle's spirituality: but his own plain confession shows, that he was really carnal, and sold under sin. Does he not say to the Corinthians, that there was given him a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet him, lest he should be exalted above measure, by the abundance of the revelations which had been vouchsafed him? 2 Cor. xii. 7. Now what could this thorn in the flesh be, but a sinful lust? And what this messenger of Satan, but pride or immoderate anger? Thrice he besought the Lord, that these plagues might depart from him, but God would not hear him. Indwelling sin was to keep him humble; and if St. Paul stood in need of that remedy, how much more we?"

ANS. (1) Indwelling anger keeps us angry, and not meek: indwelling pride keeps us proud, and not humble. The streams answer to the fountain. It is absurd to suppose, that a salt spring will send forth fresh water.

(2) You entirely mistake the Apostle's meaning. While you try to make him a modest imperfectionist, you inadvertently represent him as an impudent Antinomian; for, speaking of his thorn in the flesk, and of the buffeting of Satan's messenger, he calls them his infirmities and says, Most gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities. Now, if his infirmities were pride, a wrathful disposition, and a filthy lust; did he not act the part of a filthy antinomian, when he said that he gloried in them? Would not even Paul's carnal man have blushed to speak thus? Far from glorying in his pride, wrath, or indwelling lust, did he not groan, O wretched man that I am? VOL. II

I

(3) The Apostle still speaks of his thorn in the flesh, and of Satan buffeting him by proxy, and still calling these trials his infirmities, explains himself farther in these words: "Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in persecutions, &c. for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong. Christ's strength is made perfect in my weakness." Those infirmities-that thorn in the flesh-that buffeting of Satan, cannot then be indwelling sin, or any out breaking of it; for the devil himself could do no more than to take pleasure in his wickedness: and [in Rom. vii.] the carnal penitent himself delights in the law of God after the inward man, instead of taking pleasure in his indwelling sin.

(4) The infirmities, in which St. Paul glories and takes pleasure, were such as had been given him to keep him humble after his revelations. There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, &c. 2 Cor. xii. 7. Those infirmities, and that thorn were not then indwelling sin, for indwelling sin was not given him after his visions; seeing it stuck fast in him long before he went to Damascus. It is absurd therefore to suppose that God gave him the thorn of indwelling sin afterwards, or indeed that he gave it him at all.

(5) If Mr. Hill wants to know what we understand by St. Paul's thorn in the flesh, and by the messenger of Satan that buffeted him we reply, that we understand his bodily infirmities, the great weakness, and the violent head-ache, with which Tertullian and St. Chrysostom inform us the Apostle was afflicted. The same God, who said to Satan concerning Job, "Behold he is in thine hand to touch his bone and his flesh, but save his life"-The same God, who permitted that adversary to bind a daughter of Abraham with a spirit of [bodily] infirmity for eighteen years: the same gracious God, I say, permitted Satan to afflict Paul's body with uncommon pains; and, at times, it seems, with preternatural weakness, which made his appearance and delivery contemptible in the eyes of his adversaries. That this is not a conjecture grounded upon uncertain tradition, is evident from the Apostle's own words two pages before. His letters, say they [that buffeted me in the name of Satan] are weighty and powerful; but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible, 2 Cor. x. 10. And soon after, describing these emissaries of the devil, he says: Such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ [to oppose me, and to prejudice you against my ministry:] and no marvel: for Satan himself [who sets them on] is transformed into an angel of light, 2 Cor. xi. 13. But if the thorn in the flesh is all one with the buffeting messenger of Satan, St. Paul's meaning is evidently this: "God who suffered the Canaanites to be scourges in the sides of the Israelites, and thorns in their eyes, Josh. xxiii. 13, has suffered Satan to bruise my heel, while I bruise his head: and that adversary afflicts me thus, by his thorns and pricking briers, that is, by false apostles, who buffet me through malicious misrepresentations which render me vile in your sight." This sense is strongly countenanced by these words of Ezekiel, "They shall know that I am the Lord, and there shall be no more a pricking brier to the house of Israel, nor any grieving thorn of all that are round about them, that despised them." Ezek. xxviii. 24.

Both these senses agree with reason and godliness, with the text and the context. Satan immediately pierced the apostle's body with preternatural pain; and, by the malice of false brethren, the opposition of false apostles within the church, and the fierceness of cruel per

secutors without, he immediately endeavoured to cast down or destroy the zealous apostle. But Paul walked in the perfect way, and we may well say of him, what was said of Job on a similar occasion, In all this Paul sinned not, as appears from his own words in this very Epistle: "I am exceeding joyful in all our tribulation :-Our flesh has no rest, but we were troubled on every side: without the church were fightings, within were fears:" [We had furious opposition from the heathens without; and within, we feared lest our brethren should be discouraged by the number and violence of our adversaries :] "Nevertheless God who comforteth those that are cast down, comforted us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish" [through the thorns in our flesh, and the buffetings of Satan:] "yet the inward man is renewed day by day."It grows stronger and stronger in the Lord.-When I see St. Paul bear up with such undaunted fortitude, under the bruising hands of Satan's messengers, and the pungent operation of the thorns in his flesh; methinks I see the General of the christians waving the standard of christian perfection, and crying, "Be followers of me:"-Be wholly spiritual."Take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand, [and to witness with me, that] in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him that hath loved us."

ARG. VII. "You extol the apostle too much. He certainly was a carnal man still: for St. Luke informs us, that the contention [wapovoμos] was so sharp between Barnabas and him, that they departed one asunder from another, Acts xv. 39. Now charity [ napotunTai] is not provoked, or does not contend. Strife or contention is one of the fruits of the flesh; and if St. Paul bore that fruit, I do not see why you should scruple to call him a carnal, wretched man, sold under

sin."

ANS. (1) Every contention is not sinful. The apostle says himself, "Contend for the faith.-Be angry and sin not. It is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing."-Jesus Christ did not break the law of love, when he looked round with anger upon the Pharisees; being grieved for the hardness of their hearts. Nor does Moses charge sin upon God, where he says, "The Lord rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation." If St. Paul had contended in an uncharitable manner, I would directly grant that in that hour he fell from Christian perfection; for we assert, that, as a carnal professor may occasionally cross Jordan, take a turn into the good land, and come back into the wilderness, as the spies did in the days of Joshua: so a spiritual man, who lives in Canaan, may occasionally draw back, and take a turn in the wilderness, especially before he is strengthened, established, and settled under his heavenly vine, in the good land that flows with spiritual milk and honey. But this was not the apostle's case. There is not the least intimation given of his siuning in the affair. Barnabas, says the historian, determined to take with them his own nephew, John Mark: but Paul thought not good to do it, because when they had tried him before, he went not with them to the work, but departed from them from Pamphylia, Acts XV. 39. Now, by every rule of Reason and Scripture, Paul was in the right for we are to try the spirits, and lovingly to beware of meu,

especially of such men as have already made us smart by their cowardly fickleness as John Mark had done, when he had left the itinerant apostles in the midst of their dangers.

(2) With respect to the word [agovanos] contention or provoking it is used in a good, as well as in a bad sense. Thus Heb. x. 24, we read of [apovoμor ayamas] a contention, or a provoking unto love and good works. And therefore, granting that a grain of partiality to his nephew, made Barnabas stretch too much, that fine saying, Charity hopeth all things; yet, from the circumstances of Barnabas's parting with St. Paul, we have not the least proof that St. Paul stained at all his christian perfection in the affair.

If the reader properly weighs these answers to the arguments, by which our opponents try to stain the character of St. Paul as a spiritual man, he will see, I hope, that the apostle is as much misrepresented by Mr. Hill's doctrine, as Christian perfection is by his fictitious creed.

SECTION IX.

MR. Hill's mistake with respect to St. Paul's supposed carnality, is so much the more astonishing, as the apostle's professed spirituality not only clears him, but demonstrates the truth of our doctrine. Having therefore rescued his character from under the feet of those who tread his honour in the dust, and sell his person under sin at an Antinomian market, I shall retort the argument of our opponents; and, appealing to St. Paul's genuine and undoubted experiences, when he taught wisdom among the perfect, I shall present the reader with a picture of the perfect Christian drawn at full length. Nor need I inform Mr. Hill, that the misrepresented apostle sits for his own picture before the glass of evangelical sincerity: and that turning spiritual self-painter, with the pencil of a good conscience, and with colours mixed by the Spirit of Truth, he draws this admirable portrait from the life.

"Be followers of me.-This one thing I do; leaving the things that are behind, I press towards the mark, for the prize of my heavenly calling [a crown of glory]-Charity is the bond of perfection.Love is the fulfilling of the law.-If I have no charity, I am nothing." And what charity or love St. Paul had, appears from Christ's words and from his own.-Greater, [i. e. more perfect] love hath no man than this [says our Lord] that he lay down his life for his friends; now, this very love Paul had for Christ, for souls, yea, for the souls of his fiercest adversaries, the Jews. Hear him. "The love of Christ constraineth us. For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.-I long to depart and to be with Christ.-I count not my life dear unto myself, that I may finish my course with joy.-I am ready not to be bound only, but to die also for the name of the Lord Jesus.-If I be offered up on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy and rejoice with you all." And in the next chapter but one to that, in which the apostle is supposed to profess himself actually sold under sin, he professes perfect love to his sworn enemies; even that love, by which "the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in them who walk after the spirit." Hear him. "I say the truth in Christ, I lie not; my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I, &c. could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my kinsmen according to the flesh;" meaning his inexorable, bloody persecutors, the Jews.